In the Internet, connection-oriented transport protocols such as TCP (Transmission Control Protocol), SCTP (Stream Control Transmission Protocol) or DCCP (Datagram Congestion Control Protocol) are used to transfer data objects between applications on different end systems.
Presently, most transport protocols are limited to uni-path communications, that is, when a data object is transferred between two end systems, the transport protocols are designed under the assumption that data will flow along a single Internet path between the two end systems at any given time. Recently, research efforts have been directed towards developing multi-path transport protocols (either as an extension to an existing protocol such as TCP or as a standalone protocol). Multi-path transport protocols transmit the data belonging to an application data object along multiple paths between two end systems at the same time, thereby improving communication performance and fault tolerance. They pool the communication resources available along multiple Internet paths to support a single transport connection. When connectivity disruptions or congestion occurs on some of the utilized paths, the transport connection can still utilize resources along other paths to transmit application data objects, thereby improving communication performance and fault tolerance over unipath transports.
However, multi-path transport protocols typically only pool communication resources in the network in order to increase the robustness and performance concerning transfer of application data objects. When the local resources of one of the two end systems involved in a multi-path communication connection become overloaded or unavailable, communication can still become severely degraded or even entirely disrupted. In client-server communication scenarios, it is often the server-side resources that become overloaded, with the client having ample available capacity. However, especially in the case of a mobile device acting as the client, capacity limitations may exist on the client side, too.